The Fake Life - Love movies? We do too!

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Geek Pin-Up #14: Barbara Bach

Casino Royale is being released at the end of this week and, to celebrate, we'll be discussing Bond's impact on British international policy since the 1960's and drooling over the women he's had it away with over the years. First up, Agent XXX from The Spy Who Loved Me.

Agent XXX was designed to be the female Bond, a match for our deadly and dashing secret agent but Soviet and with tits. It failed miserably because, despite bieng portrayed as a killer, a mercenary lover and an intelligent spy, she still ends up running away from things, getting captured, getting rescued by Bond and giving up the poon to him, despite promising to kill him earlier on. It also failed because, to be the female equivalent of the increasingly daft Roger Moore, she would have had to be a pancake make-upped granny tottering around on heels and a quart of vodka.

Thankfully she was played by Barbara Bach, who is absolutely gorgeous. The producers of Bond always played lip service to having their Bond girls be strong and independent, usually shown by the actresses having dark hair, but they have always tended to slip back into blonde bimbo playboy bunny types when nobody was looking. Barbara's very dark long straight hair fits her neatly into the 'strong, intelligent' end of the Bond girl spectrum, but her fierce, piercing eyes gave her a more malevolently sexy presence than most of the blonde bond girls could ever imagine too. In looks she is similar to previous pin-up Soledad Miranda, who I waxed lyrical about here.

It is a shame, then, that her presence was mostly wasted in this film stuck slightly behind Roger Moore's eyebrows or lost in the middle of some fancy wide shot of Egypt. Also a shame is that, for a film where the evil madman lives underwater, there really isn't enough of Barbara being wet (and let's look at that above photo. It may be a lovely, revealing evening gown with excellent cleavage but the heavy, dark material doesn't work at all well wet and makes her bum shapeless. Light colours are good or, even better, a very thin material like silk. Disappointing).This is especially sad as other films (and a Google image search) have proven that, if there is a good enough artistic reason, she is completely willing to get them out.

The Bond girl syndrome of not having much of a career after shagging Bond is true of Barbara, but she did marry Ringo Starr which proves that she truly married for love or that her gaze was so intense only because her eyesight was so bad.